Saturday, October 06, 2018

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Yutaka Dirks reviews Lars Osberg's The Age of Increasing Inequality, with a particular focus on how matters have been getting worse in recent decades.

- Ryan Nunn, Jana Parsons and Jay Shambaugh study (PDF) the connection between geography and inequality, including the role of decreasing migration in locking in and exacerbating existing disparities. And Danny Dorling examines the link between higher inequality and lower life expectancy around the globe.

- Mary Bousted points out how educational inequalities arise out of social and environmental factors long before students ever set foot in a classroom. And Alex Hemingway argues that at the very least, public money shouldn't be spent subsidizing those inequalities through elite private schools.

- Rachel Shabi discusses UK Labour's turn toward democratic socialism - and the resonance of the prospect of economic democracy within the general public.

- Dirk Meissner reports on the denial of cancer treatment to a homeless man as an unconscionable example of the gaps in our health care system. And Hasan Sheikh offers a response to the desire of Doug Ford and others to make the availability of necessary care even more contingent on one's wealth.

- Finally, Andrew Coyne discusses the climate nihilism of a sadly growing number of anti-carbon-tax demagogues. PressProgress offers a reminder that we stand to lose tens of billions of dollars a year from extreme weather events caused by climate change alone. And Zoya Terstein argues that the primary problem with carbon pricing as it stands is that we're nowhere close to properly measuring the damage we're doing to our planet.